I found this on another forum, thought you guys might like to read it. Sure got me "right here".

"A Promise to Keep, Red Corvette Forges a Bond"

Byline By Steve Ritea
Staff writer for The Times-Picayune

Date Saturday, June 14, 2003

Several weeks before cancer took my father’s life, he called my brother and me into his bedroom and told us to close the door. Since his diagnosis 15 months earlier, we exchanged the words “I love you” in my family more often than ever before. We had already done our best to prepare for every issue, practical and personal. What, I thought, hadn’t we considered? David and I sat down on the bed and he began.

“After I’m gone,” he said, “I want you guys to promise me you’ll take care of. His eyes began to water, but he pushed down the tears so he could continue. I thought: Take care of what? Mom? Of course we would. We already knew that. So... what?‘1 want you to take care of. He fought back the tears again. My car.”

I just smiled. “Dad,” I said, holding back a laugh as tears formed in my eyes, “of course we will. It’s part of you.

Barry Ritea wanted a Corvette before he could drive. But for most of his life he denied himself, putting his family’s needs first. My brother and I always got the gifts we wanted on holidays, but my father didn’t get what he wanted until after we both had left home and he was nearly 60 years old. My mother said he was so excited the day he brought home the car -- a red 1994 Corvette --she saw him literally jumping up and down in the garage. That image means a lot to me, because when she told me, I knew he was finally going to start spoiling himself.

“I’ve never seen him so happy,” my mom told me, then added: “Except when we were married, of course, and you kids were born.”

When I talked to him on the phone that day, he explained it was a two-seater “for a reason”-- it was the car for him and my mother. Sure, David and I would get a ride now and then and we might even be allowed to take it out on occasion. But the passenger’s seat belonged to my mom. With his retirement fast approaching, it was, in essence, the car they would ride into the sunset.

But they didn’t wait for retirement. They started enjoying it immediately. Often when I’d call home to Virginia on Sunday nights, they’d tell me about their little weekend adventures. How they’d open a map, pick a little town maybe an hour away and take off together, winding down back roads, maybe stopping at a roadside fruit stand, and grabbing a late lunch somewhere before they headed home. All the while, my father attended to the Corvette meticulously. The car was polished weekly, pumped full of premium unleaded gas and pampered with regular engine cleanings and oil changes.

I was thrilled for my dad, but didn’t much like driving the car myself. First off, it was big and loud, unlike my quiet little Honda Civic. Second, I feared that bringing it home with a ding in the door would lead to a lengthy lecture about how it had to be parked far from other cars, even if it meant a longer walk to the entrance of a store. And finally, it was painted that bright, fire-engine red -- a color those of us with red hair avoid after years of schoolyard tauntings.

It was so large and flashy, I called it the “Batmobile.” I kidded my dad when he learned the special hand-on-the-wheel wave Corvette drivers exchange with one another out on the road. He sneered playfully back and gave me the finger.

My parents were planning a trip out to Pennsylvania for a Corvette convention about a year-and-a-half ago when I got a call at work: My father had kidney cancer. And it wouldn’t be easy to treat like the prostate cancer he had a few years before. The doctor who broke the news had told him, in practically the same breath, that he should start thinking about getting his affairs in order.

I rushed home from New Orleans. Doctors told him they would try various approaches, but the success rate for treatment of his type of cancer was about 15 to 20 percent. I asked one of the doctors, out of earshot of my family, how long my father had if the treatment did not work. He said six months to a year.

In the days before treatment began and I headed back to Louisiana, my father and I took a drive in the Corvette. We stopped in Harper’s Ferry, W.Va. and looked out at the Potomac River. He told me it was OK to cry whenever I needed to. I told him I knew, but somehow I couldn’t cry. I was just sort of numb.

On the way home we made a quick stop and my dad pulled behind a water delivery truck. Before I could jump out of the car, the truck, apparently not noticing us, started backing up. My father laid on the horn, but the driver didn’t hear. He backed into the Corvette, mangling the front of the hood.

Later that afternoon, boarding my flight back to New Orleans was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Saying goodbye was almost more than I could bear.

Eventually the car got repaired and my father found more strength than I ever imagined to endure treatment after treatment. Even when the chances for success were slim, he fought to stay alive -- sometimes, I knew, more for us than for him. Just as he had in life, so did he put his family first in the face of death.

While he grew weaker enduring the side effects of powerful drugs such as Interleuken and Interferon, the Corvette spent more and more time in the garage. At one point, it had gone so long without being driven that we had to jump-start it.

There were times, in the 15 months after he was diagnosed, that my father did muster the strength to climb back into the car with my mother and hit the road. These times, I think, meant more to them than ever before. When they were in the Corvette, he told me once, they left the cancer and everything else behind.

A few months ago, back in New Orleans, I was driving home from dinner when my parents called to announce that our last hope for treatment had failed. My father sensed he didn’t have much time left and they felt it was best to start hospice care.

I spent the next 48 hours arranging for family and medical leave from work. Fleeing town at a moment’s notice was something I had worked out to a science over the past year and my support team was already in place: Gwen and Aaron would feed my cat, Amy would take in my mail and Stephanie would keep an eye on my car.

When I got home, I found my father weaker than ever. Maneuvering up and down the stairs was so difficult for him we set up a card table in an upstairs room so we could all have dinner together.

He could no longer drive, but he still talked about getting the Corvette’s engine cleaned and made sure we started it regularly. He made us promise never to sell it.

We promised.

One afternoon when my mother and I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house, I opened the garage door and saw him standing with a rag, polishing the Corvette. I came out and helped. We used a stain remover to get a black smudge out of the car’s carpeting. Trite as that might sound, it’s a really nice memory I have now.

Four days before my dad died, my girlfriend, Alisa, came by to get a quick dinner with me near the house. My mother stopped me on my way out the door.

“Steven,” she said. “Why don’t you take your father’s car? It would mean a lot to him.” I went upstairs and asked if I could borrow his keys.

“Sure,” he said casually, trying to sound cool, but visibly happy to hear me ask.

As I eased the Corvette down the driveway, Alisa noticed my father watching us from an upstairs window. He was smiling, she said.

He died on April 28, a Monday morning. A few days before the funeral, I realized we needed something from the store. I walked upstairs to my parents’ room, opened the armoire that still smelled faintly like the cigars my dad handed out at my bar mitzvah, and grabbed his keys.

The car roared to life as I headed up to the market. Suddenly it felt good to be behind the wheel. I remembered him telling me how, driving slowly on residential streets, he always sensed the car wanted to be driven faster; how it always seemed to be saying, “Come on, let’s go...".

I turned out onto a main road and opened her up. A few minutes later, another Corvette headed toward me. Without thinking, I lifted my hand at the other driver, but kept the base of my palm resting on the wheel --just as I had seen my father do.

And then I realized it. I had done the “Corvette wave.”

When I’m home in Virginia this weekend, my mom and my brother and I are going to the Department of Motor Vehicles to have the Corvette transferred into all three of our names. We’re also going to have the engine cleaned.

On Father’s Day, we’re going to the cemetery. But I know that when I want to be with him, I won’t be talking to a marker in the ground. I’ll be grabbing his car keys, getting in the Corvette and taking a drive with Dad.


Visit The Times-Picayune at http://www.nola.com
Pub Date 06/14/2003
Publication The Times-Picayune
Copyright Copyright © 2003, The Times-Picayune. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of The Times-Picayune.

This material may not be used in any manner without the written permission of The Times-Picayune

|UPDATED|7/23/2003 9:11:18 AM|/UPDATED|

That was a good story!

johnny

Fantastic story , thanks for the chance to read it, Darla. it is happy and sad at the same time and a great family story to treasure as it sounds they will. out of respect!